A few words for version 2.0 : 
Hello everybody. It’s been more than two years since the first release of Underdog. This one supersedes the old one in every way.
Consider this one a working beta version for now and expect frequent updates. I did my best at polishing v2.0, but I can’t play test the entire game, so expect some things to be off until I sort things out.
Please, if it's not a big trouble for you, I’d love to read your comments about things you liked, disliked, experienced, requests. That will help me out to enrich the conditions. Again, I am a one person team here and I can’t possibly account for all the different load orders. Leave comments or bug reports with NPC's you think are canditates for sad, happy, sexy, strut etc. People that should be greeting you but aren't, or maybe they are greeting you too much etc. Animations that look bugged, twitchy whatever. Skyrim's animation field is a finicky place to venture for an animator. Be specific please.

Almost every animation has been remade and re-evaluated. The old ones got considerable changes, so don’t be quick to dismiss them. For example the sneak movement module got a lot simpler on how it works and doesn’t require the scrolling speed mod to look good. It’s better if you have it, but not necessary anymore.
I mostly focused on the new ones and a lot of them have extensive conditions. Please use OAR’s ingame preview ability to pinpoint which animation played or this mod to see which animation played in the console. 
Some fit perfectly lore wise, some are humorous and others just for laughs. I hope you enjoy them all in your game as much as I enjoyed making them and sharing them with you. Don’t forget to endorse if you liked Underdog.

And remember, Underdog, in its core, is not meant to replace, but rather add to your active animation packs. 

Death Animations got their own place now. Check it out here

***ENORMOUS WARNING***
Delete every previous installation of Underdog and any affiliates with it before activating this version. Easiest way to do it is within MO2 and check for conflicts and other mods overwriting or being overwritten by Underdog.



















Soooo I recently responded to an invitation that I saw at Distar's mod pages, and then I got into a Discord server, and then the people there were kind enough to share their knowledge and guidance to get into animating and one thing lead to another and, well, here we are.

This was a massive undertaking and took many, many, oh so many painful hours to make, mostly because Skyrim being Skyrim, but there it is. I consider this to be my contribution to the Skyrim animation scene and while this is not original work made from scratch, I was the first one to implement this into the game and broaden the horizons of what is availiable to us, to make the game we love, a better experience.


I present to you the Underdog - animations.
I chose to go with this name because the animations I chose to include are for the most part non existant or with very few options. DAR always intrigued me with all those special functions and what it could be achieved. Back then I couldn't do anything about it, but now you can have an immersive playthrough like none other before. Mods like Immersive interactions, EVG conditional idles and so many other great animation mods brought much needed varierty to the game, and I thought I could expand on that ideas.









A sword can be swung in so many ways...
and in the end you ll have to choose between one or the other animation pack. My goal is different. I focused on the little things. The things that surround the player moving around the world and the gameplay aspect from an animator's point of view. (I could never do what JaySerpa does :).)
If you wanna play sneak characters for example, the same old vanilla animation is ok I guess, but what if I were to tell you that you can have different walking animations depending on how fast your moving, what are you current weapons equipped, how much injured you are? I can relate that it's just a game and my character can run and walk the same at 10% and at 100% health. Well... I say no more. 
I tried my best to achieve that and Underdog is presented and concieved as a whole. Meaning, that the animations for the most part depend on eachother, but they can be seperated if you wish so and replaced with your own favorite animation packs. Also, I made the animations having a modded game in mind because, to put it simply, it's 2021 and many wheels have allready been invented. Attack animations and effects of all kinds. Tools and frameworks that simply make the game a lot better and my animations are introduced into the game having maximum compatibilty in mind.

For tl:dr people..., there is no tl:dr
"When I rise to power, those people will be sterilized" -Sheldon Cooper

For the rest of us : take a breath and relax. Make a cup of tea/coffee/beer. Light a cigarette. Maybe have a notepad and a pencil to take notes. You need to be focused and read everything I include in the installation, requirements, known issues and how it works sections. It will save you a lot of time. Underdog is very simple in its core and contains only animations. It won’t and can’t break your game in any way if you install/uninstall it anytime you want. Heck you don’t even need to run Nemesis for it to work.
But in order to define the conditions that some of the animations play, various mods from talented authors are utilized. CK and me are in no speaking terms and I can’t script to save my life.

**Second reminder to delete or disable any previous installations of Underdog and any mod that affiliates with it. I constantly come across mods that have copied meshes from Underdog and act as duplicates. The folder structure for v2.0 has changed considerably!! Check with mod organizer 2 for any overwrites with the main mod, before installing 2.0. 

In the "Files" section you will find the main mod, a file with numbered gifs corresponding to the Fomod step you are in during the installation and an index in pdf format. I suggest having the gif previews and the index pdf opened, during the installation, so you can see what you are getting. I didn't include pictures in the fomod (cause I run out of time now that the holidays are upon us. maybe on the next version), and I think using the gifs that way is more accurate.

Requirements :
Hard :
Open Animation Replacer. Sorry no DAR this time. For those skeptical about switching over to OAR, I switched from DAR to OAR mid playthrough and everything worked out fine. 

Soft :
Check within the index and the fomod for when specific mods are required. You probably already have most of these installed anyway but here goes
True Directional Movement for any movement animation. Other mods that enable 360 movement might work, but haven't tested anything other than TDM.
Disable Turn Animation SE | AE for any movement animation affecting the player
Spell Perk Item Distributor For the sitting fear animations
Wade In Water for dive and walk on water animations. Wade in water Redone works too.
Open Animation Replacer - Detection Plugin many if not all sitting, greeting, idle animations need this. *UA is setup with 1.3.1 version
Scrolling Speed 2 for crawl and sneaky sneak animations. The sneak movement module benefits from this too, but it's not mandatory any more.
Reanimated NPC Animations I have deleted the meshes folder for my game and haven't tested how both mods act together. I use it to define the Reanimated, so we only need everything but the meshes folders. Required for the Reanimated-Zombie animations.
Sleeping NPCs Detector for the walking someone is sleeping animation
Immersive Wenches for the Wench Walk


Strongly Recommended
Animation Queue Fix strongly recommended
3rd Person Walk Fix Redux strongly recommended


CHECK THAT YOU DON' T HAVE
Wounds Injury Animations - Leg animations IDLE WALKING AND RUN port from UNDERDOG Might have compatibility issues. Haven't tested
Underdog - Serana and all vampires Injury Animation fix not needed any more. Disable if you have it

If an animation is missbehaving use OAR’s ingame preview ability to pinpoint which animation played or this mod to see which animation played in the console. 

How it works :
Scrolling speed 2 : Skyrim uses two states when moving. Running and walking. SS2 affects only the running condition by applying a speed debuff on the player. Thankfully the game recognizes this and when you slow down the walk animation starts to blend in. BUT, you are technically still considered to be running. Long story short in order to trigger the crawl animation you need to be crouched/sneak/Ctrl button, running (so not have Caps Lock pressed) and speed scrolled all the way down to the slowest setting (ingame condition speed<30). And to be as thorough as I can, having pressed Caps lock to slow your speed to a walk, will NOT trigger the crawl animation. That’s it! 
Dive animation : uses the slow magic effect introduced by wade in water (and the submerged condition as to not jump in shallow splashes of water, still not perfect). If it doesn’t trigger for you then you need to check mods, probably with a jumping theme, that contain folders with higher numbers than the ones I used, which means that they have higher priority than mine. 
NPCIdleFluffRemover.esp : is a modified esp with an esl tag so it wont take up a slot in your load order. The original one is provided by nepnep on an external site. It has a simple edit in it which disables the, as I call them, fluff idles from NPCs ONLY, not the player, and allows NPCs to use a single animation mt_idle on a loop. These are the scratching, looking around, sway left and right, shifting leg weight etc. Imo these are crappy fillers and I wont be missing them at all.
The benefits of that are : 
-First only one animation file is used, not 53, which reduces Undedog's animation count by more than 1000.
-Second it eliminates the blending of the animations for when the NPC is idling. In the vanilla game the animations have very minor movement and this is not even noticable, but when I introduce a wave for example, the result is the animation starting to play and being interrupted the second it starts, allowing it to play for only a few frames, before it gets blended with the previous or the next one. And Skyrim likes to spam these animations.
-Third. I said that NPCs will use the vanilla idle on a loop, but ALSO any idle animations you have from mods that don't specify in their conditions that they are only for the player. Remember, without the esp, NPCs will not use the idle animation file that the PC uses. I am ok with that, but you might not be, as the only solution would be to adjust conditions for mods you already have working fine without the esp. In the vanilla game I haven't seen once an NPC use the mt_idle animation file, which is the only one the player character uses.
-Forth. The esp disables the fluff idles for NPCs, BUT the moment you talk to them, they will start using the fluff idles again. I am very happy with this, because 1. it allows Underdog animations to occur cleanly, as most of them are ment to play as you pass by NPCs, 2. it enables previously disabled animations and that is a good thing, because now Underdog's animations are even less likely to repeat, having served their purpose, 3. allow wonderful mods like NPC Animation REMIX and Gesture Animation Remix by CHIMgarden to continue to function, during dialogues. Any other animation NPCs use, like warming hands, using tools, having their routines and reactions, should not be affected by the esp.
-Fifth. The esp should be safe to remove at any time.
-Sixth. Having said all that, I didn't have any noticable difference ingame (yes, I find the fluff idles that redundant). It was only when I started noticing idles, I would see only for the PC, affecting NPCs that I noticed the effects of the esp.
All in all I see it as a win win, as this allows for a much cleaner way to have NPCs play animations, rather having them do blendy animations, with no control over the randomness of dosens of them that could occur.

That is as far as I have thought about including this and I can't see any major downside. Please report if you see anything funky.

Known Issues :
-Old man walk special animation has a wierd bump when transitioning from running to walking. I still like the animation, so I included it.
-NO SKIRTS were harmed in the making of this animation pack. No seriously, the skirts are minimaly animated, because... reasons. If the need arises I might find the courage to adjust this. Damn you Vilkas…
-Some animations use transitional animations, for example the vanilla sitting idles are 6-8 main animations and there are 4 more transitional animations leading from one to the other. This becomes impossible to cover the more animations there are, so expect animations that use transitions to "snap" when they switch.
-Some clipping issues with objects mainly. The one that comes to mind is the Laughing hard sitting animation, that doesn't take into account an object, like a table, in front of the chair.
-Some walk/run animations might feel off for lack of a better word, probably due to different speeds the NPCs use. I tried my best to minimize this but, checking with OAR's Animation Log, the game spams, amazingly a lot and at a very fast pace, animations that most of the times it doesn't even make sense. For example most of the guards spam walk and run animations when they are moving, seemingly at a walking pace. 
-The injured run animation has some sliding. I tried fixing it to no avail.

Things that will be fixed in a following version :
-The dive animation can be fixed. Thank user ErickHendrix2 for that. In OAR in the folder2xxx74 disable all current checked options at the top and check "only use triggers from annotations".
-Folders 2000...468 and 470, waving greets for male and female, have incorrect random values. They should be 0.0909.
-Naruto run footstep annotations
-2000000509 Terrified IdleCover, added conditions
Fixed in 2.0.4

If you have this gem DAR Animated fear , rename its DAR animations folder from 2020 to 2000000500, to brink it in line with Underdog.



SNEAK

INJURED

FALL

NINJA

TORCH

JUMP

WALK, RUN, SPRINT SPECIAL

GREET

CHEER

DANCE

SIT

ZOMBIE ILLUSION FIRE

IDLES

TAUNT

DEATH got its own place now. Check it out here



The end.
I hope I did well with this project. Please use Underdog with an open mind.
As always.
Enjoy!